Recalling those WWII skies

Thursday

May 30, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Albert B. Southwick

There we were, two ancient codgers, both older than 90, recalling those heady times 70 years ago when we took to the air in service to our country.

My Navy career began right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Karl Briel’s began in 1940 when he went to Canada and signed up with the Royal Air Force. He learned to fly under primitive conditions — no radio communication, for example. He once piloted a squadron of obsolete canvas-covered bombers across Canada from Ottawa to Vancouver.

“We just used megaphones to yell at each other” he says.

After Pearl Harbor, Karl joined the U.S. Army Air Force. I became a pilot in the Navy air wing. He ended the war flying the biggest plane, the B-29 Superfortress, that the Army Air Force had ever flown. I ended the war flying the biggest plane that the Navy had ever flown, the PB4Y-2 Privateer.

Not that our experiences were identical. My flying career lasted a little over two years. Karl’s 10 years. The B-29 was twice the size of the Privateer. It carried a load of 20 tons — compared to five tons for the Privateer. The B-29 probably was the largest propellor-driven plane ever built at that time. The blades were 8 feet long.

I’m writing about the situation in 1943-44. Even the B-29 would be dwarfed by the modern day commercial behemoths. But at that time, the B-29 was enormous. And we had never seen a jet.

Once he left Canada and joined the U.S. Army Air Force, Karl had plenty to do. He soon was training fledgling pilots to fly the B-24 Liberator, the workhorse of the Allied bombers in Europe. It was built mostly at Ford’s enormous Willow Run plant. More than 18,000 Liberators were produced before the war ended, a record number.

The B-24 was the only plane that we both flew. I was assigned to B-24s after a stint flying anti-submarine patrols in the PBY seaplane out of Jacksonville, Florida. But by the summer of 1944 the German subs had been driven from the Atlantic, and the Navy found itself with a surplus of seaplane pilots. So they sent us to an unlikely place — Hutchinson, Kan., where the Navy had a pilot training base. They trained us in B-24s in preparation for the Navy version, the PB-4Y2, just coming off the line.

In late 1942 Karl was tapped for a dangerous assignment — flying “the hump” from India to China. That was the only way that supplies could be brought to Chiang Kai-shek’s army in southern China. It meant flying over the Himalayan mountain range at more than 25,000 or 30,000 feet, sometimes in blinding fog. On good days they could see Mount Everest, sometimes they could see nothing. Karl’s closest call came one day when he was flying at 25,000 feet through “soup” when a crewman yelled that he had just seen some rocks flash by his turret window.

“So it was full throttle on all four engines, back on the yoke and up, up, up!” he recalls with a chuckle. They made it safely. Not everyone did. The India-China corridor was one of the most dangerous of all. Dozens of planes crashed and burned on those rocky, icy slopes

After the “hump” experience, Karl was assigned to a B-29 squadron and flew 38 bombing missions over Japan from the base in China — a 20-hour trip. His plane was hit twice by anti-aircraft fire. The first knocked out an engine, but was able to continue on three engines to a safe landing. The second was more serious. It hit a fuel tank and quickly drained the fuel supply.

“We were on the verge of bailing out, when we spotted a nearby airfield,” Karl recalls. “We were able to just barely make it. We landed without power. All four engines had quit.”

I can’t come close to anything like that. After being checked out on the B-24, our Privateer squadron was sent to Shemya, an island on the western tip of the Aleutian Island chain. Our assignment was to fly air cover for the North Pacific fleet and, in our spare time, drop 500-pound bombs on Paramushiro, the big Japanese base.

We were lucky. Our sister squadron lost a third of its planes and a third of its men over Okinawa, but we came through without a scratch. Our most deadly enemy was the weather — violent, unpredictable and often socked in. Fortunately the war ended a few weeks later. On Aug. 14, 1945, we were 500 miles out headed for Paramushiro with a load of bombs when the radioman came into the cockpit and announced “the Japs have surrendered.” That was the end of my flying career. I resigned from the Navy and finally arrived home in November.

Karl remained in the service after the war and steadily rose in rank. One day at Elmendorf Field in Alaska, where he was testing the B-50, an improved version of the B-29, he was approached by a tall man whom he recognized — Brigadier General Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh asked if he could go on Karl’s next flights and he did so for several days. Only later did Karl learn that Lindbergh was checking him out for some new responsibility and was reporting back to the Army with his recommendation.

“On his last trip with us, I asked him if he would like to fly over the North Pole,” Karl remembers. “He said that he would, so we did.”

Karl left the service in 1950. Perhaps the best way to sum his career up is to list his medals — Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with three oak clusters, Presidential Citation with two oak clusters. Yet I doubt that Karl ever thinks of himself as a hero, any more than I do. Greatest Generation? Never gave it a thought.